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Attention XML and the Big Brother fear
Posted by Rene Jansen
Today I received a nice mail from Vincent, author of the Zesser blog. He pointed my "attention" to his posting on Attention XML.Attention XML follows the kind of the same methodology as bPerform does, in a sense that it monitors users behavior, to enable the easier "re-finding" of information you once read. Secondly, it enables to suggest (pro-actively) content that might be interesting for you.
His post reminded me on a topic that I wanted to discuss with you for quite some time, what I will call the Big Brother fear: Today in the Amsterdam subway, I bumped into Maureen, a nice girl who used to sing in one of my former bands. I hadn't spoken to her for quite some time, so we had a nice chat and a good laugh. After a while I told her about bPerform and what we try to achieve.
When she learned from me that bPerform will kind of monitor what you do to be able to pro-actively guide your attention and focus to information that might be interesting for you, she reacted like "oh, mmm, so, my manager will have a powerful means to monitor what I am doing? I would hate that!".
I explained to her that the objective is definitely not to "monitor and punish". I heard about this fear earlier, and this fear is actually an important reasons why we offer our product in combination with training and coaching of both the knowledge workers and their managers. If managers should use web2.0 to monitor what their people are doing, they will reduce the willingness of users to share information in a web2.0 way, and by that, remove all the advantages that web2.0 offers to all of us.
During this discussion I realised two things: 1) The Big Brother fear should be addressed in both the software and the marketing communication of our product 2) that our product is most suitable for organisations with "new types of managers". The former "command and control" managers will not realise any benefits with web2.0, but I am sure the new generation managers that understand the essence of the knowledge economy will not use bPerform to control their people, and by that, will benefit greatly from improved information sharing, community building and happier employees...